Nick Land

"the fundamental axiom of ontological illiberalism: the assumption that anarchic competition tends inevitably to full monopoly is absolutely basic to a huge range of statist ideologies. I find it hard to understand how this axiom got so deeply established, given that basic biological reality so dramatically disqualifies it. Nature is anarchic competition, and clearly doesn't tend to a monopolistic equilibrium. (Nor does world history or domestic economics, although the evidence is more open to controversy in those cases.)"

"Christianity is certainly not essentially communism, but it spawns communistic mutants with the same inevitability that Creation spawns devils and sin."

"Kant's critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth."

"Gazing into the golden rage of the sun shreds vision into scraps of light and darkness. A white sun is congealed from patches of light, floating ephemerally at the edge of blindness. This is the illuminating sun, giving what we can keep, the sun whose outpourings are acquired by the body as nutrition, and by the eye as (assimilable) sensation. ...Mixed with this nourishing radiance, as its very heart, is the other sun, the deeper one, dark and contagious, provoking a howl from Bataille: ‘the sun is black’. From this second sun—the sun of malediction—we receive not illumination but disease, for whatever it squanders on us we are fated to squander in turn."

"Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured. They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts—and even pretend to revere them—the result is (this is not a description without generosity) 'unappetizing'."

"I dream of the damnation I have so amply earned, stolen from me by the indolence of God."

"God is nowhere to be found, yet there is still so much light! Light that dazzles and maddens; crisp, ruthless light. Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die? Or the moon retain such fidelity to the Earth? Where is the new darkness? The greatest of all unknowings? Is death itself shy of us?"

"Nature, far from being logical, 'is perhaps entirely the excess of itself', smeared ash and flame upon zero, and zero is immense."

"Dead labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule."

"That the root of love is a thirst for disaster is exhibited throughout its erratic course. At its most elementary love is driven by a longing to be cruelly unrequited; fostering every kind of repellent self-abasement, awkwardness, and idiocy. Sometimes this provokes the contempt that is so obviously appropriate, and the tormented one can then luxuriate in the utter burning loss that each gesture becomes. One wastes away; expending health and finance in orgies of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power to the point of destitution, pouring one’s every thought into an abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a trajectory lies the final breakage of health, ruinous poverty, madness, and suicide. A love that does not lead such a blasted career is always at some basic level disappointed..."

"In Nick Land’s essays like "Machinic Desire" and "Meltdown," the tone of morbid glee is intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a perverse and literally anti-humanist identification with the "dark will" of capital and technology, as it "rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities.""

"Land was our Nietzsche—with the same baiting of the so-called progressive tendencies, the same bizarre mixture of the reactionary and the futuristic, and a writing style that updates nineteenth-century aphorisms into what Kodwo Eshun called 'text at sample velocity.'"

"Nick Land identifies capital as a planetary singularity toward utter dissipation whose dynamism becomes more complicated as it circuitously verges upon zero."

"Land not only renounced the respect of his academic peers, but many times even lost the confidence of his supporters, as he sought by any means possible to drill through the sedimented layers of normative human comportment."

"Let's get this out of the way: In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did 'go mad'."

"... something decidedly non-Derridean was taking shape that flowed from a strong cocktail of Georges Bataille, Philip K. Dick, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and various chemical substances. The key figure here was Nick Land, with whom I’d been a graduate student at Essex... Nick had the most meteoric and savagely satirical mind. His collected writings have recently appeared as Fanged Noumena (2011), which I see as a kind of righteous revenge. Nick was dismissed by professional philosophers because they simply didn’t want to think and preferred their turgid academic complacency. I always admired him for his unwavering desire to take thought to its absolute limit and then see how much harder one could push... Nick’s weakness was his strength: seduction. This meant that he produced disciples. It was amazing. You’d go and give a talk at Warwick and be denounced by people with the same saliva-dribbling verbal tics as Nick and wearing similar jumpers."

"Land dresses his fascism up as an athleticism to hide the cowardice of defending the forces of this world, namely, the courthouse of reason, the authority of the market, and a religious faith in technology."